Local SEO focuses on increasing the online visibility of businesses that depend on exposure to customers in their geographic area. It’s built on the same foundation as organic SEO, but also includes ranking elements that target the Google Maps algorithm, which differs from organic SEO. Optimizing your online presence by ensuring you have a Google My Business profile, accurate business data (citations), consistent reviews and other local signals, users searching for local businesses are more likely to find your company’s location and contact information before they find your competitors.

Local SEO is a specialized subset of SEO that requires its own strategy and tactics. Many agencies offer local SEO as a sideline to their core SEO services, but few specialize in local SEO as DAGMAR Marketing does. We’ve helped business owners gain new, qualified leads in a range of industries, such as pest control, personal injury law, medical practices, and many more. We’ve even been recognized by Search Engine Land with an award for Best Local SEO Initiative in its international digital marketing competition.

To help ensure you choose the best local SEO company for your needs, look for the following:

• Proven results: Ask prospective SEO companies what kind of results they’ve gotten for clients in the local marketplace. Look for case studies on their websites and ask for more details.
• Transparency: An agency should have a standard practice to provide clients with regular, detailed reporting that explains how budgets are used.
• Honesty: No reputable local SEO service provider can promise you first-place rankings in search results or guarantee when that might happen. Local SEO is a long-term process and its success is built over time.
• Focus: Look for an agency that specializes in local SEO and has it as one of its core services.
• References: Ask for references from both past and current clients to learn more about what it’s like to work with the agencies you’re interested in.

As with organic SEO, you may see some improvements in your local visibility in the first three months of a local SEO campaign. These changes are usually the result of correcting existing issues and establishing your local profile on Google. As time goes on, adjustments to your campaigns, linking to authoritative third-party sites, and building up the quality and amount of content you have on your site will yield more improvements. Patience pays off—the competitors who often outrank you achieved those results with long-term, sustained strategies and tactics.

Local SEO is our core service and we’ve spent years creating successful local SEO campaigns for clients in a range of industries. We know what works and what doesn’t, and we use your budget accordingly. When you’re a DAGMAR local SEO client, here’s what you can count on:

• A customized strategy that we continue to adjust in response to your changing business needs and your changing marketplace.
• Detailed monthly reporting that’s provided in terms you can understand and that tells you just where your dollars go.
• Expert technical SEO that helps you capitalize on every opportunity.
• Personal attention from our experienced project managers.
• High-quality content that provides long-term returns on your investment and that builds a robust and authoritative online presence for your business.
• Not just more leads, but better-qualified leads, which helps maximize your budget.

We’re hands-on every month, providing all of the services needed to increase your online visibility with your best local prospects. Our work for you each month includes a mix of these tactics:

• Keyword research to gain insights into the people who look for your local business.
• Technical SEO optimization tasks that ensure search engines “see” the local signals that influence your rankings.
• Link building, which includes identifying local and national blogs that are relevant to your business, reaching out to them to request publication of content that will link back to your website, then creating that content.
• Content development, which may include blog posts, additions to your web pages, and how-to guides that improve your rankings, position you as an authority in your industry, and encourage prospective customers to do business with you.

We make sure you fully understand everything we do for you each month. You’ll receive reports that explain in plain language how we used your budget and how well your local SEO campaigns performed in the previous calendar month. If you ever have questions or additional needs, our project managers are available anytime to help.

We create your local SEO campaigns from the ground up, customizing our services to your specific needs. Since no two clients need the same service mix, we price our services accordingly. Read our pricing information to learn more about how we estimate our services and get a general idea of what our local SEO services cost.

When the name, address and phone number (NAP) of your business is referenced—or “cited”— online, that’s a citation. Citations are essential to local SEO rankings because they do something Google rewards: help prospective customers find local businesses. When your NAP information is verified, Google sees that as a signal that your phone number and address are trustworthy enough for your business to be listed prominently in Google Maps.

Citations that can affect rankings also appear on websites, social media, and in local business directories. The best citation strategy focuses on high-quality placements, working to increase the number of citations, and making sure that your business name, address and phone number are accurate and have a consistent appearance across every mention.

White hat SEO includes the tactics that exist naturally within the SEO ecosystem. These tactics include creating authoritative content, having a fast website, and content marketing. Black hat SEO uses tactics that focus on gaming the search engines’ algorithms, such as massive link-building schemes, machine-generated content, and fake authority signals.

White hat tactics tend to be sustainable, while black hat tactics are not. White hat SEO requires long-term work to improve a client’s rankings, while black hat SEO aims for rapid spikes that rarely last. At DAGMAR, we focus solely on white hat tactics. If you’re looking for black hat SEO, we’re not the local SEO company for you.

When Google finds an inbound link from a relevant and authoritative site to your site, it considers that a sign of your company’s legitimacy. A link from a guest blog post or from a business organization you’re a member of carries a lot of local SEO weight with it, so link building is a tactic that shouldn’t be left on the table. Getting a link with the power to boost your local SEO isn’t as simple as it sounds—it can take many hours to get just one—so you should expect your SEO company to devote a fair portion of your budget to this task.

Content has an increasingly important role in both local and organic SEO, but not just any content. For the best SEO results, content must be highly relevant, helpful to the reader, and well written. Google rewards good content that meets those goals with better rankings, and the more good content you have, the better those rankings will be.

A fairly recent development in SEO is the rise of long-form content and its positive effect on SEO results. At DAGMAR, we regularly produce content with word counts in the thousands, which may be a blog post, a how-to guide, a web page about your company’s locations, or other piece. For local SEO, we focus that content on topics and information that’s relevant to and attracts prospective local customers and that helps position you as an authority in your particular line of business in your area.

Along with link building, content development is the best long-term use of your local SEO budget each month.